The water is gone

Wednesday afternoon I returned to the SW entrance with Mark Walvoord. We walked up the old trail and I was surprised to see that the acres of inundation, there since mid April were gone. Everywhere there had been a continuous shallow lake, the water had drained away leaving either sodden, now mushy organic packs of leaves, bark and forest litter or bare thin mud. I wondered about the fate of the populations of mosquito wrigglers I had seen there days earlier. I believe there may still be standing water further north along Chautauqua but there has been a large area drained - not quite dry in the past few days.
We exited the Woods at the mid point of the south boundary where water was still ponded up a few feet in depth. Water was also still slowly flowing a foot deep in the south ditch and out the drainage culvert towards the Canadian River.